10th Grade Humanities with Lori Fisher
This year we are learning about the truth behind war, what causes it, what wars there are, and how to put it into writing and other projects.
"We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war." Chapter 5, pg. 88
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Truth of War ProjectWe learned about World Wars I and II during the past few months through reading two famous novels. One was All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and the other book we read during this section was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Both were anti-war books, talking about the two world wars we have encountered in our history. We wrote an essay to show our perspective on the truth of war for a soldier. Click here to view my essay. I am explaining the effects and consequences the media has when it glorifies war in video games, movies, and television shows. We also had the opportunity to create a project based off of those two books and the essay. For it I decided to write a short story loosely based off a story I had written last year for Humanities. Click here for the story. I also painted a portrait of one of my main characters, Samantha, with a quote from All Quiet to show how she is feeling on the inside after the war is over.
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Genocide Op-EdFor the past few months we have been learning and studying the Rwandan Genocide and the horrors that came from it. Afterwards we were released to study our own form of genocide for an Op-Editorial we had to write about what happened and if it could justifiably be considered a genocide according to the 1948 Genocide Convention. To go with the Op-Ed, was a political cartoon based on a particular event in the genocide we decided to study.
I am somewhat of a cartoonist myself, as I am constantly drawing some form of cartoon and labeling and captioning it with a phrase that suits it. However, I never got too politically active in these little cartoons, so figuring out a good caption that would work right with my first cartoon from studying the Rwandan genocide, and even in my final product. By working on this product, i can find the right phrase and/or caption to match my drawings. I have also written Op-Ed articles before for classes, and for old newspaper clubs in middle and high school. So this type of writing is not very new for me. However, the subject that I had to write it about is a different story. I wrote about the 1937 Nanking massacre, where over the course of 6 weeks, 300,000 Chinese citizens were brutally murdered by Japanese militia. I can use this form of writing to use in studying and presenting significant historical events. The reason for this, is that it is a way to simplify a very complex issue into a way that any normal human being can understand. To read my Op-Ed, click here. |
Final Draft: "The Innocent are Never Spared; but they still fight back with Peace, not Swords"
The young girl is wearing traditional Chinese robes, the color of the Chinese flag, and is holding a branch of cherry blossoms, a typical symbol of peace and harmony in both Japan and China. The man is a soldier who is holding a samurai sword, representing that he is a Japanese soldier. The sword also symbolizes a game that the soldiers used to play during the massacre where they would see who could cut the heads of 100 men with a samurai sword. The uniform he is wearing is similar to the uniforms that the Japanese soldiers would wear to battle. |
Omelas Seminar
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
The page to my Seminar pre-write is here. And my reflection is here. |
The Global Village Seminar
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**Poem name got mixed up
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Power 1841
For a few years now, I have been absolutely infatuated with a singer/songwriter by the name Emilie Autumn. She makes songs and poetry about the tyranny and abuse that was pressed upon women in the 1980’s in England. A big part of women’s suffering in that era was due to insane asylums. During that time men could say that women were trying to kill them or were just plain crazy, and without a professional physcologist to tell them that they were wrong, took their words to heart. And alas, these innocent women were placed in an asylum.
And it was not what asylums were in the 1960’s. Doctors did not use real medical procedures. They weren’t even real doctors, per se, instead they were mad scientists who wanted study how much pain a human body could take before it finally gave up. Things such as leeches, frontal lobe phlebotomy's, vivisection, and medicinal ‘cocktails’ found their way into the bodies of the inhabitants. I even mention the idea of phlebotomy in the middle of my poem in the line “they took their hammers their nails/ and ripped them through her head that night”. This imagery used here was meant to invoke images of the asylums. Other things I used as inspiration in my poem is through the work of Edgar Allen Poe. I have read a bunch of his work in the past few years, and find that his style of writing is not only beautiful, but very gruesome. This is due to him writing about homicides and suicide. But it doesn’t find its way entirely into my poem. As this is an accusation poem about heartbreak from loss of a family member due to an actual crazed man sending his normal wife away. Now, through my process I had to find a happy medium that had mostly to do with power. I knew that I wanted to make a Victorian era style poem, one that was centered around the issue of asylums. I am used to writing poetry in a formal formatting. I had also been reading a lot of Ee.Cummings during the period of time that I was writing and coming up with ideas for my poem. Since a lot of my poems are very formally written, I wanted to make a poem that less formal. Ee. Cummings poems are very random and all over the place in formatting and language. I tried imitating his formatting style for my poem, which was an effective way of showing the tone and urgentness of the poem. A crazed mind is slow at times, fast at others, and always very scattered. Using this format helps get into the mind of the husband and the other crazy people who were out in the world. My poem is here. Reflection here. |